Archive for the ‘Religion as Design Fault’ Category
Buggy software
If there is one common argument for religion that has little merit, it is the appeal to the near-universal human predilection for religion. When almost everybody believes something, this can have only two explanations: either the truth of that something is so overwhelmingly obvious as to be undeniable by all but the perverse; or else [...]
Feeling is not cognition
People complain that we think too much and feel too little. In fact it is the other way round. Any culture that follows the verb ‘to feel’, not only with a direct object but also with the conjunction ‘that’, thus making a propositional statement, is necessarily in big trouble. ‘Feeling’ that something is or is [...]
Racism and rheumatism
It has recently been suggested that what we call racism is a runaway process starting from something that is biologically adaptive but taken way too far, in much the same way as obesity is what happens when the body’s legitimate needs for fats and sugars meets modern refined food. We seem hardwired to be inordinately [...]
Pulling our strings
It is old news that when we have an infection, our bodies do things that are of no value to ourselves but considerable value to the vectors of the infection; ‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases’, just as our mothers taught us, and that is why they happen. The disease makes us do things in its [...]
Catching the religious cold
I am not particularly enthusiastic about meme theory, at any rate when it becomes a monovariable explanation. Religion is certainly something done to most of us, but that is not the same as it being done to all of us; the danger of meme theory is that it may get the profiteers from religion off [...]
The meaning bug
Our heads are not tabula rasa, open to considering the world without prejudice; information can only be processed by the brain designs that we actually possess. Natural selection in the human social environment may have produced an organised cognitive system responsible for the illusion of both personal immortality and personal destiny. There is experimental evidence [...]
